We're not going to have to tear up the speech, are we?" George W. Bush asked late last week, as his aides labored over the text of Tuesday night's State of the Union address. Bush was gently mocking the endless process--and perhaps acknowledging how many reasons there are for last-minute rewrites: a war and a recession, an anxious public, an aggressive opposition party, and above all the fast-moving story of the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history--a scandal that has so far defied White House attempts to isolate it or explain it away. In the space of five days last week,...